Happy talk

Sign language enables deaf people to communicate with the versatility and nuance of speech - but only as long as their partner in conversation understands sign language. People who aren't deaf seldom do. James Kramer, an electrical engineer at Stanford, is helping overcome this communication barrier. He has invented an electronic glove that can translate finger spelling - a simple form of signing in which the fingers spell out each letter - into speech. And he's working on a system that can handle the full complexity of American Sign Language, in which words are represented by elaborate movements of the hands and arms.

Kramer got the idea for his "talking glove" while watching a demonstration of a robotic hand that could finger-spell words typed into its computer. In the demonstration a deaf-blind man sensed the letters by feeling the robotic hand. He finger-spelled his reaction to an interpreter. "This is neat," he said. But Kramer was not satisfied. "I thought, |Well, this is neat, but this is only half the communication. Why not make a device that recognizes the deaf-blind person's finger spelling and converts it directly to speech?'"

Kramer's glove senses the finger motions of its wearer with 22 sensors embedded in the Lycra fabric along the fingers, thumb, and wrist. By measuring the flow of electricity through the sensors, Kramer's device determines the exact position of the fingers; a bent sensor offers more resistance to the current than a straight one. A small computer then takes this electronic information and matches it to a letter in a preprogrammed dictionary of finger-spelling positions. The glove wearer signals the end of each word with a flat, horizontal hand, and a small speech synthesizer worn as a pendant around the neck utters the word.

Kramer has also built gloves that can sense the full arm motions of American Sign Language; electromagnetic sensors on each glove's wrist determine the hand's location in relation to a fixed point. To translate such complex motions into words, however, Kramer has to develop much more complicated software than he did to translate finger movements into letters. He is still working on that.

But the sign-language gloves alone, he says, already have a possible application: they could allow two deaf people to converse by videophone. Because current videophones send complete visual images through a small phone line, they can only update the image about once a second - far too slow to convey the rapid hand motions of sign language. With Kramer's gloves, however only the electronic signals encoding those motions would need to be transmitted; on the videophone monitors, they would be converted into real-time computer images of moving hands and arms.

The only thing needed to build such a videophone, according to Kramer, is a little money. "There's so much technology available," he says. "It's a shame there isn't more developed for persons with different abilities."

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